The Anti-Fritz Candidate

Rep. Mary Nolan is running for City Council but hasn’t yet connected with voters.

BLUNT TALK: Rep. Mary Nolan—here at a Friends of Trees event March 24—says her record of getting things done is a stark contrast to her City Hall opponent, incumbent Commissioner Amanda Fritz. - IMAGE: Mike Grippi

About 25 people have
gathered for a candidates’ forum at the June Key Delta Community Center
in North Portland. Everyone else is at ease moving around the room,
shaking hands, chatting up voters. Not Nolan. She stands to the side, as
if out of her element, with pursed lips and forced smiles.

Only when it’s her
turn to speak does Nolan relax. She introduces herself as a candidate
for Portland City Council, and she’s running “because Portland is at a
critical point and we need important results.”

People who have worked with Nolan, 57, over the decades in business and government say she’s smart, honest and driven.

“She keeps her nose
to the grindstone, and she gets impressive results,” says Geoff
Sugerman, who worked for House Speaker Dave Hunt when Nolan was majority
leader in 2009. “But she’s not warm and fuzzy.”

“[Fritz]
says she wants to be watchdog, and that’s an OK thing to do,” Nolan
says. “I don’t think that’s all a City Council member should do. We also
need to produce results.”

Yet Nolan is also the
anti-Fritz in a way that also reminds voters why they like Fritz, who
is proudly unconventional, loves to attend community events and
personally responds to thousands of emails.

Nolan—blunt, direct and minimalistic—acknowledges she often counts on an aide for the little touches a politician often needs.

“I am not always the
one who thinks about sending a birthday card or making a call on those
kinds of personal parts of people’s lives,” Nolan says. “But I’m smart
enough to make sure somebody’s paying attention to that human piece of
it.”

Nolan
has raised serious cash for her campaign—$217,000 since announcing her
candidacy last summer. She’s shown an ability to draw contributions from
business, unions and other interests that often disagree.

Her biggest donation:
$20,000 from the city’s firefighters union. (Fritz limits herself to
contributions from individuals, of no more than $50 a year. She’s raised
about $30,000—plus a $50,000 loan to herself.)

Yet with less than
seven weeks before Election Day, Nolan has yet to punch through and gain
the name identification she’ll need to take out the better-known Fritz.
Fritz’s campaign released a poll last week that purports to show her
leading Nolan, 44 percent to 10 percent.

Nolan says other polls show them closer and that two-thirds of voters are still undecided.

“This is why we hold elections,” Nolan says, “to talk about the record and accomplishments that people can count on.”

Nolan
grew up with five sisters in a Catholic family that lived in Chicago
and Stamford, Conn. She was on the high-school debate team, excelled in
math and, in 1972, was part of the first class of women admitted to
Dartmouth College.

Interested in
environmental work, Nolan moved to Portland in 1976 with a boyfriend and
landed at the City of Portland’s Planning Bureau.

She oversaw street
lighting, public works maintenance and environmental services in the
1980s and early ’90s. She later worked for a PacifiCorp subsidiary and
moved to New York to work for an international bank.

U.S.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, then a city commissioner, hired Nolan to run the
Bureau of Maintenance, and later the Bureau of Environmental Services.

“It
was not the easiest environment for a woman manager who was about the
size of some of the jackhammers people used,” Blumenauer says. “But she
really impressed the workforce.”

Nolan
earned her pilot’s license in the 1990s after watching her husband,
Mark Gardiner, fly. (Gardiner is the former city economist and chief
financial officer.) Her experience led her to co-found a business,
AvroTec, that makes GPS technologies for airplanes. She stepped down
from an executive role when she was first elected to the Legislature in
2000.

As a representative
from Southwest Portland, Nolan focused on health care and environmental
issues. She has been the Democratic caucus’s majority leader, served on
the Joint Ways and Means Committee and co-chaired the budget
subcommittee on public safety.

Nolan has a
reputation as a party-line Democrat, consistently scoring high with the
American Civil Liberties Union, the Oregon League of Conservation Voters
and Planned Parenthood.

ON POINT: Nolan has spent 12 years in the Oregon House; she says the direct style she displayed in Salem will serve her well in City Hall.

IMAGE: Mike Grippi

Nolan’s work on Ways and Means led to some of the work she says best defines her success in Salem.

Her biggest
legislative accomplishments, she says, include establishing a mechanism
for funding the state’s Healthy Kids program, giving part-time students
access to college scholarships, and pushing through the largest-ever
school funding appropriation in 2007.

WW, in its
biennial ratings of legislators, last year called her “sharp—and
sharp-tongued.” Nolan says her direct style means people know exactly
where she stands. “Those who count her out do so at their peril,” one
lobbyist said.

Few doubt Nolan’s skills in the Capitol, including members of the other party.

“She’s an inside
fighter in the sense that she understood how the Legislature worked,”
says Rep. Vicki Berger (R-Salem). “Often things get done if the
groundwork is done with a series of phone calls first. She’d make the
call.”

One of her best-known votes in Salem, however, created friction within her own caucus.

In 2009, Democrats
pushed through a 6-cent-per-gallon increase in the state’s gasoline
tax—the first in 16 years. The $300 million transportation package also
included higher vehicle fees—also unpopular.

A lot of Democrats
didn’t want to vote for the bill, especially those in swing districts
who might face attack from Republicans in the next election for
supporting a tax hike.

Nolan, as House majority leader, lined up reluctant Democrats and persuaded them to vote for the package anyway.

But when the bill came to the floor, Nolan herself voted no. She was one of only five Democrats who voted against it.

Berger, the Salem Republican, joined Democrats to vote for the bill. She says her “jaw dropped” when Nolan defected.

The vote left many people who had taken a risky vote feeling bitter. (One anonymous commenter in WW’s legislative ratings called Nolan’s vote “incredibly selfish.”)

Nolan
says she understood the importance of the bill to the state, but she
personally disliked the way it favored certain pet transportation
projects.

“I had two
responsibilities,” she says. “One to my constituents, and the other to
my caucus. I am straightforward. I was really clear with the people who
were counting the votes what I was going to do.”

Nolan was also one of
the leaders who fought for Measures 66 and 67, the divisive increases
in corporate and personal income-tax rates on the wealthy that voters
approved in January 2010.

Some
Democrats were accused of trying to extract payback from business
lobbyists who had fought the measures. One was Jon Chandler, a lobbyist
for the Oregon Home Builders Association.

The Bend Bulletinreported that Chandler, after writing a July 2009 op-ed for The Oregonian
critical of Democratic leaders, got a voice-mail message from Nolan
that suggested he might pay a price in Salem for his opposition to the
measures.

“Hey, Chandler…I
somehow managed to miss your retirement announcement,” the newspaper
quoted Nolan as saying on the lobbyist’s voice mail. “When did you
decide you were going to drop out of the lobbying business? Let me know
if there’s a farewell party; I certainly wouldn’t want to miss it. Stay
in touch. Thanks.”

Nolan said it was a joke. Chandler wasn’t laughing.

“Mary can rub folks the wrong way,” he says. “Obviously, she rubbed me the wrong way at one point.”

But
he argues the Portland City Council could use some “adult supervision.”
In December, Chandler donated $250 to Nolan’s City Council campaign.

“I don’t think a
little doggedness would hurt that group at all,” he says. “If she thinks
something is good, she’ll try to get done. If she thinks it’s stupid,
I’m guessing she won’t. And if she pisses off one of her colleagues, I
don’t think she’ll care.”

Nolan says she’s
confident her legislative strategies will translate to success on the
council. Her priorities if she’s elected to City Hall will be investment
in East Portland, better managing public utilities, and improving
coordination between city police and the county sheriff.

More than just issues, though, she promises she can change the way the council works.

“I might very well
find a disagreement with some of my future colleagues about where to
prioritize this service or that service and disagree with them and vote
differently than they did, but that doesn’t prevent us from working
together,” she says. “The council as a whole doesn’t now demonstrate a
capacity to do that.”